After Modernity, What?

We acquire language through repetition, and in everyday life the
repetition of a word helps fix its meaning. But not always. Especially
not in the academic world, where the most intense intellectual commerce
often involves exchanging, and haggling over, the semantic equivalent of
wooden nickels-words like "alienation," "diversity," "values,"
"hegemony," "social democracy," and so on.

One such term that has been coming on strong in recent years is
"postmodernism." It is hard to think of a term in the lexicon of
contemporary intellectual fashion, with the possible exception of
"multiculturalism," that is more elusive. Yet the sprawling vagueness of
such a term, like the sprawling vagueness of Finnegans Wake,
seems only to augment its market value in the strange world of academic
discourse. When William James asserted that we ought to judge our ideas
by their "cash value," he was perhaps saying more than he knew. He could
not have guessed how soft the currency would eventually become and how
well the signifiers would float.

Still, whatever the reasons for their suddenly ubiquitous use, the terms
"postmodern" and "postmodernism" do seem to point toward something real,
something that is changing dramatically about our world; and it is one
of the considerable virtues of Gene Edward Veith's Postmodern
Times that it undertakes to formulate, with great clarity and
accessibility, what that "something" is. Veith is careful to distinguish
between the two terms. The assertion that we live in postmodern times,
with which Veith agrees, does not automatically commit us to accepting
the secular ideology of postmodernism, which he largely rejects. He goes
on to argue that the questions engaged by his book are not merely
philosophical, in the narrow use of that term. Indeed, the repercussions
of postmodernity, far from being confined to those arenas in which
rarefied academic debate takes place, are felt throughout the culture,
and are already powerfully manifest, not only in art, politics,
literature, architecture, popular entertainment, and law, but in the
very rhythm and texture of ordinary Americans' lives. Even in the
Church, particularly the evangelical Protestant wing that makes up much
of Veith's intended audience, the disturbing effects of the postmodern
perplex are beginning to show.

Such a holistic and comprehensive approach to culture invites comparison
with the idiosyncratic work of the late Francis A. Schaeffer, who
similarly liked to meld haute intellectual history with pop culture
criticism in his comparative studies of rival worldviews. Such an
approach always draws detractors. It has proved easy for conventional
scholars to poke holes in Schaeffer's analyses, which, though often
brilliant, are also admittedly haphazard in method, and often greatly
oversimplify and overschematize their subjects. Even so, his works have
endured, and proved suggestive and valuable, precisely because they
address the profound issues that cultural historians are almost
congenitally unable to deal with. And in its insistence upon the
profound cultural consequences that flow from our most basic shared
intellectual premises, Schaeffer's work shows a high regard for the
power of foundational ideas.

Veith, who is a Missouri Synod Lutheran (and Professor of English at
Concordia University in Wisconsin), has produced in Postmodern
Times a more refined and cautious, but no less suggestive,
contribution to the Schaeffer tradition of theologically informed
cultural analysis. Hence, although the book will certainly be of
interest to scholars, its subtitle suggests a different audience:
reflective Protestants who want to understand what the apparent collapse
of modernism may mean for the culture, for the Church, and for
themselves as Christians.

Veith's answer to these concerns is optimistic, but very cautiously so.
The modernist worldview, with its "totalized" enlightened faith in
secular, rationalistic, naturalistic, materialistic, and demystified
modes of explanation for all things, has by and large been the sworn
enemy of Christian orthodoxy. So modernism's slow but inexorable loss of
authority at the hands of physicists, philosophers of science, literary
theorists, and others would seem to be a welcome development. But Veith
warns that the secular ideology of postmodernism will
eventually be every bit as hostile to Christianity as modernism was, and
perhaps more so. Why? Because Christians have one thing in common with
modernists: both believe in the possibility of intelligible absolute
truths. Therefore both are guilty, in the eyes of postmodernists, of the
sin of "universal or totalizing discourse," the distrust of which is the
hallmark of postmodernism.

Since it defines itself by opposition, postmodernism is best described-
indeed, can only be described-by a series of antitheses. Where
modernists believed in determinacy, postmodernists embrace
indeterminacy. Where modernists value synthesis and comprehensiveness,
postmodernists value deconstruction and fragmentation. Where modernists
value the type, postmodernists emphasize the deviant. Where modernists
esteem a personal ideal of responsible agency and integrity,
postmodernists reject "the authentic self" as an illusion, an attempt to
reify a mere collocation and ensemble of social roles. Where modernists
esteem the work of art as a serious, self-contained, absolute, and
finished work, produced by an autonomous creative artist, postmodernists
emphasize art as an arena of playfulness, irony, referentiality,
process, performance, and incompleteness, in which the audience
participates in the creation of meaning. Where modernists think
foundationally, and believe objective truths can be discovered,
postmodernists think anti-foundationally. They believe that truths are
constructed by social groups and their languages; dismiss science and
philosophy as totalizing "metanarratives"; and view history as nothing
more than "a network of agonistic language games." Indeed, at the very
core of postmodernist ideology is the assertion that language is a self-
referential "prison house" which cannot take in truths about the world
outside, but can only construct meanings out of itself. There can be no
transcendent Logos; the only reality is virtual reality.

For a religion built upon exaltation of the Word, whose God not only
called the world into being through words but is linguistic in His very
nature, such a suspicious view of language would seem to have little to
offer. Yet Veith does think that there are a few things to be said for
postmodernism from a Christian perspective, though each of these things
is only a highly partial commendation. First, he believes the technique
of deconstruction can be valuable, but only if it proceeds on the
assumption that the underlying reality of our lives is not masked power
relations, but the far deeper reality of sin; and only if it leads to
the realization that the construction of one's own meanings, in place of
the one true God, is a form of idolatry. Christianity calls upon its
followers to cast down idols and die to self; but it calls on them to do
so for the sake of Christ and His kingdom, and not merely because they
have discovered that golden calves and other expressions of "the sacred"
are social constructions, and "the authentic self" is a bourgeois
illusion. Postmodernism, then, like all heresies, has a piece of the
truth, but only a piece. As Veith puts it, "Postmodernism unmasks
problems that modernism tried to hide, but postmodernism can by no means
solve them." The second part of that proposition is perhaps obvious; it
is the first that Veith especially wants us to take into consideration.

Another point to be made in postmodernism's favor, argues Veith, is the
fact that it at least allows cultural room for Christianity in a way
that the rationalistic tyranny of modernism did not. The current vogue
of "multiculturalism" (depending upon what one means by that most
mutable term) accentuates that possibility, especially insofar as it
undercuts notions of commonality-more totalizing discourse, that-in
favor of tribal forms of association, each with its own characteristic
brand of cognitive "difference." In the postmodernist dispensation,
Christians too can claim the coveted status of "outsider" or "marginal,"
and triumphantly call themselves "resident aliens," even if they happen
to be tenured white males ensconced in prestige universities. But, as
Veith adds, Christians will eventually become targets in a postmodernist
culture if they insist upon the transcendent truth of what they profess,
since that will constitute the one punishable sin against the
postmodernist (dis)order of things.

So even postmodernism's seeming beneficence is likely to sour, Veith
predicts, and Christians would do well to distrust it. It is almost
entirely in the decline of modernism, and not the rising postmodernist
alternative, that the Christian opportunity is to be found. It seems
reasonable to posit that a postmodernist political order would be
utterly ruthless, since all standards of truth-telling and consistency
would have been rendered illegitimate-along with the concept of
legitimacy itself. Indeed, postmodernism has profoundly antihumanist
tendencies, since it deconstructs both the individual and the general
idea of humanity; developments like violent environmental extremism and
the animal rights movement are among its quintessential, if not entirely
logical, outgrowths. In this respect, nothing could be more challenging
to postmodernism than the account of human origins presented in the
first two chapters of Genesis.

All these points, and many others, are dealt with by Veith in crisp and
direct language, with emphasis placed in each instance upon the specific
implications for Christians; and in so doing, he has performed a
valuable service. If one had to identify a defect in Postmodern
Times, it would be only in that one sometimes feels that the book
grants too much internal consistency and too much credibility to
postmodernism as a coherent philosophy, when it is in fact an outlook so
riven with internal contradictions, and so shot through with
frivolousness, that it seems unlikely to outlive the decaying modernism
upon which it battens. Indeed, it is tempting to argue that
postmodernism is merely modernism gone to seed, without rigor or
seriousness. For all its putative sympathy for those who suffer and are
oppressed, postmodernism often seems little more than a philosophical
pose for the comfortable and jaded and clever, those living off
inherited capital that they pretend to despise. It seems unlikely that
postmodernism will have much to offer them, or anyone else, when times
of crisis come, as they inevitably will. If there have been few atheists
in foxholes, there will be even fewer postmodernists.

Christians, Veith suggests, ought to be able to mount a distinctive
challenge to postmodernist platitudes, one that does not simply support
or reprise modernist ones, but moves the discussion onto fresh
territory. In this undertaking, he recognizes, nothing will be of more
fundamental importance than rescuing the dignity of language from its
postmodernist detractors and their sometimes unwitting allies in our
image-saturated culture. Because of the centrality Christians assign to
the Word-spoken, written, and incarnate-the redemption of human language
becomes a central Christian task. It is a challenge for which Veith
finds biblical precedent. The Tower of Babel, constructed at a time when
the world had but one language, was the quintessential modernist,
universalist project-man in his pride reaching to the heavens. Then God
stopped the construction, and the Babelite's self-deification, by
confusing the languages of the world-man's fall into a kind of
postmodern perplexity. And so matters remained until the dramatic coming
of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, when men speaking in their own strange
tongues were heard as if they were speaking in the hearers' language-
thus reversing the curse of Babel and restoring language, through the
ministry of the Holy Spirit, at the Church's founding moment.

The first two parts of the story are familiar enough from any number of
legends, fables, and traditions. Christianity holds no patent on the
recognition that pride goeth before a fall. It is the final part of the
story that remains startlingly unique. Which again suggests the cultural
opening that Christianity-particularly a revival of classical, orthodox,
confessional, and postliberal Christianity-may find in the years to
come. The seemingly endless invocations of "multiculturalism," for
example, if they do not lead American society down the road to
balkanization and cultural solipsism, can serve to highlight the
Church's unique understanding of how unity and diversity are reconciled.
"The universal Church, spread through history and throughout the globe,"
Veith rightly asserts, "is the one true multicultural institution." As
such, it can be a sign of contradiction confounding the pretensions of
modernists and postmodernists alike.

Wilfred M. McClay is Associate Professor History at Tulane University
and author of The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern
America (University of North Carolina Press).